The present disclosure relates to methods of operating a wind turbine with reduced fouling, particularly to wind turbines having an active flow control (AFC) system, and a wind turbine including such AFC system.
Although horizontal axis wind turbines are well-established these days, there is still considerable engineering effort going on to further improve their overall efficiency, robustness, and power generating capability.
This research has lead to the most recent AFC technologies which aim to improve wind turbine efficiency. AFC technologies try to avoid flow separation over rotor blades by actively modifying the wind flow proximate to the rotor blade. This can be achieved by ejecting gas through apertures formed in the surface of the rotor blade.
The introduction of such AFC systems has brought about the fact that the apertures used for blowing gas eventually collect dirt or impurities. This phenomenon is one aspect of what is referred to as blade fouling. Blade fouling can substantially lower the performance, in particular the extracted power of wind turbines.